In Days Of Old...

Following last year's carbeque jihad in Paris, some asked why France couldn't become more like old Andalusia.

Jihad Watch Board Vice President Hugh Fitzgerald explained why not:

...we are left with a myth of Al-Andaluz that requires ignorance of the facts to survive, and many ... are happy to oblige. Yet even these romanticizers who write of Al-Andaluz as the great exemplar of tolerance also consider it to be, at best, a unique example in the long 1400-year history of Islam -- which already is a way of admitting that the treatment of non-Muslims under Islam in general was not a paradise of "tolerance" and fruitful mutual accommodation...

No wonder it is not only non-Muslims who like to imagine such a world, but also those Muslims who feel they must stick with Islam, they cannot jettison that belief-system with which their entire civilization, their ancestors, and they themselves are so identified. These believers must create, or must believe in, a mythical world of past tolerance that is now being "ruined" by these Bin Ladens and the others who have "hijacked a great religion."

-- Nick